Call of Duty: Black Ops dev says that releasing a bug-proof game is unachievable

Treyarch's community manager has been talking about Call of Duty: Black Ops' launch problems, saying that releasing a bug-free game is unachievable, but that the team are committed to solving problems with the game as soon as they emerge.

Treyarch Community Manager Josh Olin was speaking to Videogamer when he made the comments about Call of Duty: Black Ops, saying "It is unfortunate that those [bugs] have to exist at all. In an ideal would we would love to ship a completely bug-proof game. I can't think of a single developer in the world, though, that could achieve that."

Olin, who recently listed "negative" gamers as one of the major problems facing the game industry, attributed Black Op's problems to the sheer number of people playing the game. "If you look at the population size of the Call of Duty franchise, just a single hour of gameplay collectively after the game's been out - you add up all the man-hours that all the fans put into it - that's more time than you could put into Quality Assurance in a lifetime."

A British consumer group, GamersVoice, recently reported Call of Duty: Black Ops to the Office of Fair Trading for its buggy state on release. Bugs have continued to affect the game. A recent patch caused movies made in the game's theatre mode to disappear. Olin says that Treyarch is committed to fixing bugs as quickly as possible. "When they pop up, though, it's really important that we are well equipped to quickly address them and quickly patch them."

"We've had, like, six or seven patches, depending on which platform you play on, since the game came out - so we're talking six or seven patches over the span of two to three months. That's a lot of post-release support, and that's something that we're going to continue - that's not going to stop."

"Even if the bug is only hurting a hundred fans, if we can find the cause we'll patch it."

In other Call of Duty: Black Ops news, Treyarch have recently talked favourably of the idea of a futuristic Call of Duty game. For more on the game, check out our review, and the official Call of Duty: Black Ops site.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom stopped being a productive human being when he realised that the beige box under his desk could play Alpha Centauri. After Deus Ex and Diablo 2 he realised he was cursed to play amazing PC games forever. He started writing about them for PC Gamer about six years ago, and is now UK web ed.